Back in the day when I was paid to do diplomacy, it was a refreshing if not a bracing bucketful of icy water to hear Russian diplomats talking about their professional discipline. I remember one telling me about a mistake a colleague had made:

“Yes, he got that wrong. He has been punished accordingly”

Wait … punished? Literally no-one in the modern UK Foreign Office has any idea of what that word means. Even (especially) if you do something horribly wrong, your line manager will be studiously solicitous and bend over frontwards to avoid giving any impression of bullying. Plus, in today’s post-modern diplomacy who’s to say what’s right anyway? Isn’t the very idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ problematic? And maybe even … judgmental?

Outside in the real world, everyone dislikes being punished for misbehaving. Everyone really dislikes being punished in front of other people for misbehaving. That adds public humiliation to the chastisement. There’s the pain of punishment itself. And there’s the perception of how far the punishment is fair. Welcome to the world of economic sanctions.

Sanctions are as old as diplomacy itself. You do something that hurts me? I hurt you!

Thus, in 432BC in response to sundry affronts the Athenians cracked down on the trading municipality of Megara, banning Megarian merchants from Athenian harbours and causing Megara much hardship.

For a more recent version, see what sundry Crimea/Ukraine blunderings are costing Russia:

[B]ecause Russia is the planet’s heavyweight champ in territory terms, it takes a heavy blow to catch sanctions to catch Russia’s attention. And this has been delivered.

Russia’s GDP in 2006 was at some $1.3 trillion. After the global crisis in 2007/08 it climbed strongly to $2.2 trillion, by far Russia’s best result since the end of communism. But then (giddy with success?) the Kremlin launched its Ukraine Crimea-grab and many other violent destabilisations.

Wide-ranging Western sanctions were imposed. Russia’s economy has slumped backwards towards its 2005/06 level. Since Russia escalated its Ukraine machinations in 2012, the US piled on a further $3 trillion in GDP, while Russia lost $1 trillion.

The opportunity cost of this massive wealth lost to Russia – in good part due to sanctions – compounds up over the years and decades. That’s a lot of clever new military kit and social investment afforded. Or not.

Why sanctions anyway?

The whole point of economic sanctions imposed by a group of states on state X is to change state X’s approach by increasing the cost to state X of continuing with what it’s currently doing. An ostensibly simple message:

“You carry on doing all this bad stuff? You’ll get poorer. Maybe a lot poorer!”

But it’s not so simple. Sanctions make the sanctions-imposing states themselves poorer too, by closing off normal trading options. Hence squabbling within the EU over renewing economic sanctions against Russia: some EU member states lose out more than others.

And the threat of making state X poorer works only if state X takes a hard look at its options and decides (a) that, yes, it will indeed be poorer, and (b) that any gain from sticking with current policies is not worth that pain.

What if state X concludes (correctly) that it can tighten its belt, and use the imposition of sanctions to develop wily new home-grown industries to replace what it can no longer import? Some pain today – new strength tomorrow.

Or state X might work out clever schemes to carry on exporting by badging its exports under the flag of a friendly state that does not support sanctions:

“You say we’ll get poorer. Are you sure about that?”

So … do sanctions work?

The North Korea case is especially interesting. Russia is furious about new US sanctions against Russia emanating from President Trump’s Washington. However, Moscow and Washington (and Beijing) also agree that ‘something must be done’ about North Korea’s bombastic missile launches, and so have imposed new measures to hit what passes for North Korea’s economy.

Yet the dilemma remains. ‘Something’ is ‘being done’. But is it making the difference required?

What’s the point of punishing the hapless North Korean (or Serbian) masses when the real problem is their leaders? Is the idea that the masses get so vexed at this situation that they rise in fury and topple their own leaders whose bad policies have created their misery?

What if in fact this doesn’t happen? What if the leaders of state X just don’t care if the masses of state X gets poorer as long as they stay in power?

What if the leaders of state x and their closest cronies in fact get richer through manipulating sanctions rules, even as the state X masses are impoverished?

What if sanctions make those awful leaders stronger by reducing their incentives to cooperate and allowing them to froth up domestic patriotic defiance?

Is Cuba a successful example of using strict economic embargoes over some 60 years to promote democratic change? No.

But surely we can stop the Syrian regime from brutalising the Syrian people by blocking their access to, say, … expensive saddles?!

Thus the idea has emerged of ‘targeted’ sanctions aimed at key members of an errant regime and their ill-gotten wealth. Some 250 senior Syrians are the subject of an EU travel ban and asset freezes.

EU sanctions list in almost comic detail supposedly luxury items that can’t be exported to Syria to satisfy greedy local elite appetites: